HTTPS Migration For Google News Publishers Going Smoothly

On August 12th, I migrated this site, which is not a small site, from HTTP to HTTPS and honestly, the migration has not been bad at all. Technically, it only took maybe a couple of hours, including spotting and fixing 99% of the miscontent match errors and rewriting URLs, 301ing, fixing images to make sure they are over HTTPS and more. But on the traffic side, I have not seen much of a change.

I personally did this, so I could jump in first, and report back to you if it is safe. It seems safe, but let me share my results. First Webmaster Tools search queries report:

HTTP version drops around the 12th but note, the top line is 1 million impressions:

HTTPS version climbs up, but the top line is only 800,000 impressions:

When looking at organic Google traffic, comparing August 13 through September 17th to the previous time period, I see a -2.54% drop in traffic, which is not significant based on how much traffic the site gets.

The more worrisome is how Bing and Yahoo handled it. Bing shows a -7.87% drop and Yahoo shows a -9.20% drop. So keep that in mind!